Justine Sacco: Caring about random people’s racist tweets

Until last Friday morning, you’d probably never heard of Justine Sacco. In case you still haven’t, she was the Internet Bozo De Jour who fired off an extremely insensitive tweet that subsequently had everyone from BoingBoing to CNN to The New York Times focusing on her.

“Going to Africa,” she wrote in a message. “Hope I don’t get AIDS! Just kidding. I’m white!”

The message was retweeted over 3,000 times before the account was suspended (Almost certainly by Sacco; Twitter, the company, usually stays out of this stuff.) She got off the plane in Africa and was promptly fired from her job in (wait for it) public relations at media conglomerate InterActiveCorp, despite her apology.

There is no debating that what she said is extremely offensive — IAC was right to fire her. But a number of online commenters questioned why they were reading about Sacco on their chosen news outlets in the first place. She did work in PR but she wasn’t a public figure by any stretch. CNN called it a “firestorm of controversy” but it was really hard to find anyone defending her (here’s one, with bizarre logic).

“I’d like to know why everyone gets so worked up over these things,” wrote a commenter on The New York Times. “People are stupid, and stupid people say stupid things. If you want to get mad, get mad at the environment that has allowed someone to grow up to be this stupid. People aren’t born thinking like that.”

A million people say stupid things on the Internet every day. And sometimes there are consequences for those people. Do I agree with the tweet? I think it’s a fairly banal tweet from some person I don’t know who is of no real importance. So, I am largely indifferent to the tweet. I frankly don’t care.

I think that a lot of people do care about it, and that making fun of public acts of privileged stupidity does make a difference. It helps diffusely, in how it influences the culture of discussion, and directly, in that people see it and pledge.

Mashable editor Chris Taylortoed both points. “There’s a fine line between slamming Sacco for her blatant what-guys-I-was-just-kidding buffoonery and taking an unconscionable delight in the misfortune of others while playing Big Brother on their lives,” he wrote.

The fervor around Sacco was intensified because she was on a long Internet-less flight to Africa. Many Twitter users eagerly awaited her comeuppance, going so far as to create a hashtag, #HasJustineLandedYet, which was used by major media outlets.

“When her plane lands in Cape Town, I hope not a soul tweets her picture. I hope they show a far older social response, and turn their back on her,” Taylor wrote.

A decade ago, Sacco’s insensitivity would be confined. Maybe she makes that quip into a microphone at an IAC event. She still loses her job but the reaction is a room full of people saying “What a ridiculous jerk” and moving on with their lives. A small group of people — work associates, friends, etc — would have shunned her and she would have learned an important lesson.

Now those comments are stamped, forever, in 1′s and 0′s. Now we have someone ambushing her at an airport in Africa even though no one knew her name 12 hours prior. Now we have to ask ourselves if that kind of public beating, the infamy, the difficulty she’ll have getting a job again, equates to a fair punishment for the transgression.